The Top 20% AI Habit

Here is what the top 20% performer are using AI to move faster and scale their revenue

Last week I was on a live panel with three brilliant experts. An executive coach, the founder of a scaling consultancy, and a behavioral scientist who has spent decades studying what actually works inside teams. We came at the conversation from completely different angles. But by the end, we kept landing on the same point without even realizing it.

The people who are curious enough just to start playing with AI are pulling miles ahead. Everyone else is standing still and waiting for a permission slip that is never going to arrive.

That gap is not going to close, itt is going to widen. And if you run your own business, that gap is not a career problem. It is a revenue problem.

Riding a Bike vs. Flying a Plane

I have used this analogy for two years now. In the world of AI where some people are walking some are riding a bike,a small group is driving fast cars or flying planes. After two years of actually using these tools every single day, I am now hundreds of miles ahead of where I started. . A couple of years ago, I was at a dermatology clinic and I watched two admins booking every appointment on paper. When a client called to move a time, I heard them flipping through pages on the phone, trying to find it. I asked the owner if I could give him some feedback. I told him straight up, every time a client waits while someone flips through paper, that client is quietly deciding whether to trust you with their face.

He pushed back at first. ‘People are the way they are’he said. I get that. But I told him, you are doing your team a disservice, and you are doing your clients a disservice too. Three months later, they were using Excel. It was Not fancy but it made a difference immediaely.

#1 Difference between getting reach vs getting choses.

Reach gets someone to see your name. Trust is what makes them pick you over the ten other people who showed up in their feed today.

Everyone is racing to automate content, automate outreach, automate the DM sequence. It’s good, automate it. But the moment everything is automated, trust becomes the only thing left that actually sets you apart.

So the real question is not how do I save time with AI. The real question is what am I going to do with the time I save? Automate the busywork and then fill that space with more busywork, and you have wasted the entire upgrade.

There is one specific habit separating the top 20 percent of business owners I coach from everyone else, and it has almost nothing to do with which tool they use.

You Are Already Managing a Team You Cannot See

When the top performers sit down with any AI tool, they spend real time up front telling it exactly who they are before they ask for anything. Where they are from, who they serve, what they have built, what they are trying to do next. Only then do they ask the question.

Most people skip straight to the ask. That is like walking into a room, cutting off a stranger mid-sentence, and demanding an answer with zero context. You would never do that to a person but somehow we do it to AI constantly, then wonder why the answer feels generic.

When you sit the next time to write anything, Spend the first few lines telling it who you are and who you need it to be for this specific task. I promise the output changes completely.

Whether you realize it or not, you are already managing a small team of agents doing work that used to eat your whole afternoon. The business owners pulling ahead right now are not the ones with the fanciest tools. They are the ones who learned how to brief a team well, human or otherwise.

The Gap Only Gets Harder to Close

I have coached over two hundred business owners, and less than a third of them are using AI regularly. Some of them I gave the exact steps to two years ago, and they still have not started. Meanwhile, the ones who did start are hundreds of miles ahead, the same way I was.

In a market where 20 percent of people are moving fast and everyone else is falling behind by varying amounts, you get to choose which group you are in, andyou only get to choose today. The gap gets harder to close every week you wait.

And one of this is about working more. Rest is part of the work too. The point of saving time is not to fill every freed-up hour with another taskit is to protect the hours where you actually connect with a client, think clearly, or just breathe. Leaders who never log off are not modeling strength. They are modeling burnout for everyone watching them.

P.S. If the dermatology clinic story hit home, if you know you’re the “walking” or “paper filing system” business in your niche and you’re tired of watching the 20% pull further ahead, that’s exactly why the Thought Leadership Branding Club exists. It’s my community of business owners learning to brief AI like a pro, automate the busywork, and use the time they get back to actually connect with clients: masterclasses, coaching calls, people who’ll push you to start this week instead of next quarter. Come sit in on an event and see if it fits: www.thoughtleadershipbranding.club/events